How Netflix's new Amanda Knox documentary makes you completely rethink the case

On November 1, 2007, in Perugia, Italy, 21-year-old Meredith
Kercher was found murdered in the bedroom of an apartment she was
sharing with two Italian women and a 20-year-old American
exchange student named Amanda Knox. Knox and her boyfriend,
Raffaele Sollecito, said they realized something was wrong when
they discovered Kercher's door was locked, drops of blood in the
bathroom, and a broken bedroom window. They proceeded to call the
police.

What followed is a sensational story that tabloid journalists
went crazy over, and which ended with Knox spending four years in
an Italian prison following the murder, for which she was
convicted, until she was ultimately acquitted.

Five years after being freed from prison because of DNA
contamination and a year after Italy's highest court exonerated
her, a new documentary, "Amanda Knox," delivers the definitive
tell-all of the events.

To be released by Netflix on September 30, the movie had its
world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival and
received rave reviews for its in-depth investigation of every
aspect of the Knox saga told by many of the main players,
including Knox.

Directors Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn, like most people in
the world, couldn't get over how much media made the case a
sensation. By 2011, when they started work on the movie, the Knox
story dominated headlines once again when she was freed from
prison.

"I think that for us we were a little bit confused by why it was
so big and also how something that starts as an undeniable
tragedy and a terrible act of violence becomes a piece of
front-page news and that then becomes entertainment," McGinn told
Business Insider at TIFF. "So we thought it would be interesting
in looking at how that happens and to try to get really deep
inside to the roots of what really causes that kind of story."

"There were so many headlines, and so many stories, and yet
people didn't seem to have any further clarity," Blackhurst
added.

Netflix

What "Amanda Knox" reveals is how crucial mistakes in the
handling of the crime scene and a false confession by Knox led to
complete dysfunction in the case. But it also shows how
journalists became obsessed with Knox.

Footage of her kissing Sollecito and showing little remorse for
what happened to her roommate by the time news cameras arrived at
the crime scene started the narrative. In the weeks and months to
follow, Knox was branded as sex-crazed, and as the investigation
continued, the theory was that Kercher was a victim in some
deviant crime of passion involving Knox and Sollecito.

Though before this film, Knox had done the big TV interviews and
a book once back in the US, Blackhurst and McGinn still felt Knox
hadn't opened up and given her side of the story, and neither had
Sollecito, nor the lead investigator of the murder, Italian
detective Giuliano Mignini.

"All of them felt this narrative the media put out there was not
representative of who they were and we wanted to understand from
a human point of view what it would feel like to have that
applied to you and what it felt like to be caught up in these
events and circumstances," Blackhurst said.

So the filmmakers began trying to get access to everyone who was
involved. But they made it clear that they would not move on the
film until their subjects were comfortable.

"We met Amanda and Raffaele when they were acquitted in 2011, but
it wasn't until 2013 that she decided, on her own, that she was
ready to talk," Blackhurst said. "That was always very important
to us to say we're not going to come and dine and dash, we're not
trying to steal something out of your mouth and leak it on
Twitter as quickly as possible. We want to put in the time to
understand you as people."

They shot Knox for the first time in 2014. Once she signed on,
Raffaele, Mignini, and others including Nick Pisa, who broke many
of the stories about the case for the Daily Mail, also agreed to
talk.

But then there was explaining to an audience what likely happened
to Kercher, and that meant diving into DNA evidence and deciding
how to deliver the information as simply as possible.

The filmmakers used graphics to point out that Knox was never in
the room where Kercher died, according to the DNA present in the
room. They also showed that DNA evidence linking Knox to the
knife thought to be used as the murder weapon was inconclusive.

"Initially we thought the graphics would be more complex," McGinn
said, "but what we realized quickly was the only way to keep it a
human story and feel empathy for the people involved was to put
it in more layman's terms."

Along with the graphics, McGinn and Blackhurst got the DNA
experts from the trial to be in the movie. They had never
previously done an interview about this case.

The filmmakers are most proud of bringing much-needed context to
the moments that were only captured in small news bites around
the world when the case was happening.

In "Amanda Knox," we get never-before-heard audio recordings of
Amanda and her mother speaking in prison, and some added clarity
to the footage everyone remembers of Knox kissing Sollecito
outside the murder scene. The documentary explains through
interviews with Knox and Sollecito that it was not what it
seemed.

"You can feel what it felt like for those people to be caught up
at that time," Blackhurst said of the movie. "You're able to give
context to this one little bit because you now can see and hear
from them."